How to add subtitles to a video (free)

Typing subtitles by hand takes several times as long as the video. Speech recognition does the first draft in minutes: it listens to the video, writes down what's said and times each line, and you fix what it got wrong.

• In your browser. The free auto caption generator transcribes a video on your device, so it's never uploaded. The first time, it downloads its speech model. You get the subtitles as SRT or VTT files, and can send them straight to the burn-in tool.
• On YouTube. YouTube makes automatic captions for many uploads with speech recognition, in the video's default language. They aren't always ready when you upload, and they may not appear at all when the sound is poor or people talk over each other.
• By hand. For a short clip, play it, note when each line starts and ends and type the lines into a subtitle file. Keep each one to a line or two that can be read in the time it's on screen.

Every way of adding subtitles comes down to one of two things. A subtitle file sits beside the video, and the player draws the words in its own style. Burned-in captions are drawn into the picture itself, so they're part of the video wherever it goes.

Most people do both: a subtitle file for the full video on YouTube, and burned-in captions on the clips cut from it. The file formats themselves are explained in what is an SRT file?

Automatic subtitles are a draft. YouTube says its own can misrepresent what's said because of mispronunciations, accents, dialects or background noise, and asks creators to always review them. Before you publish, read them through with the video playing and look for:

• Names and brands. People, products and places the model hasn't heard of come out as similar-sounding words.
• Numbers. “Fifteen” and “fifty” sound alike, and a wrong price or date changes the meaning.
• Slang and crosstalk. When two people talk at once, one of them usually goes missing.
• Long lines. Split a subtitle that runs to three lines or flashes by too fast to read.

If every line is early or late by the same amount, the file was timed for a different cut of the video: shift all the times by the difference. The free SRT to VTT converter shifts a whole file at once, and turns SRT into VTT and back.

In YouTube Studio:

1. Open Subtitles in the left menu and choose the video.
2. Select Add language, pick the language, then select Add under Subtitles.
3. Choose Upload file, then With timing for an SRT or VTT file (or Without timing for a plain transcript, which YouTube times for you), choose the file and select Save.

Two other options sit on the same menu: Auto-sync, where you paste or upload what's said and YouTube sets the times, and Type manually, where you type the subtitles as the video plays. To fix YouTube's automatic captions instead, open them from the same Subtitles page and edit the parts it got wrong.

TikTok has auto captions on the editing page after you upload or record a video: TikTok transcribes the speech, and you can edit the text before posting. Instagram can add closed captions to reels from their speech, which can be turned on or off. Viewers can turn both off, and both come in the app's own plain style.

That's fine for accessibility, but it isn't what makes a clip easy to follow. The bold captions on clips that do well, a few words at a time with the word being said lit up, are burned into the video before it's posted. Make them once and they look the same on TikTok, Reels and Shorts.

Most editors import an SRT file as a caption track that you can restyle and then burn in when you export. In Premiere Pro, for example, you import the SRT like any other media and drop it onto the sequence, where it becomes a caption track, and the export settings let you burn the captions into the video. Burned-in captions can't be edited after the export, so fix the track first.

No editor? The free add captions to video tool burns an SRT or VTT file into a vertical 1080 × 1920 video in your browser, word by word, in the caption styles Clyper's clips use.

Captions on a clip do a different job from subtitles on a film. They hold attention, so they follow different rules:

• A few words at a time. Clyper's Pop style shows up to 3 words at once, so the eye never has to read ahead.
• Big and bold, with an outline or shadow so they read over any background.
• The word being said stands out, in a second color, which keeps people reading along.
• Clear of the apps' buttons, above the caption text and the side buttons each app lays over the video.

For sizes, fonts and where to put them, read how to caption short videos.